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Friday, 11 March 2016

Harold Wilson At 100

Today, 11th
March is the centenary of the birth of Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister in
the 60's and 70's. Wikipedia has a full
article about him. A bright Grammar
School boy who went to Oxford and did well, becoming an academic close to major
figures, then moving into Civil Service and then embracing politics. After History and PPE he later took to
statistics and these became almost, if not all, his credo.

This brief clear article from The Guardian puts the case for what he did
do that many today regard as for the good and seeks to claim for him the status
of a PM who did quite well and who may be wrongly written off as one of the
losers of history. To revert to figures,
albeit not statistics, if a PM is involved in 250 major decisions, not all will
be anathema to history and similarly he will not get them all right.

It is not just
a numbers game. It is the big decisions
and those which will create major turning points of history that matter, rather
than the shoal of many minor decisions and issues. Then there is the degree to which he is
involved and who was chiefly or critically the person or persons that mattered.

As it happens
although I was only at the same time and place as Wilson barely a handful of
times and did not know him, I did once work with a man who was his election
agent for a few years and had a high regard for him personally. So criticism does not arise out of personal
dislike but of what he did or did not do.

The question
of his "failing" as a PM another matter. But in the period 1951 to 1979 it is arguable
that all of them were failures. Some
were better able to shift the blame and get away with the deceits, some were
not. It is curious that those who were
more decent as people are often labelled
the greatest failures.

In this period
what was in the mindset of many of our leaders etc. was the experience of World
War 2 and Wilson was at the heart of government. We liked to think that we had won the war by
virtue of joint national effort centrally directed, planned and organised. If we could invade Europe and beat the
Germans by these means, surely dealing with the economy and finance etc. was
easy in comparison and only to be expected to achieve the goals.

Looking over
the Wikipedia page however, two things are striking. One is the scale, the complexity and the
sheer weight of work in the critical problems across the whole field of
government. The other is that the Labour
Party believed that Westminster could deal with it, control it, organise and
run it. The planning that was supposed
to be "indicative" too often was meddling and intrusive.

We were said
to have a "two party system" as though each party was coherent in its
ideas and essential policies. The
reality was that each was a coalition of groups that were often seriously
opposed. Wilson, certainly spent as
much, if not more time, fighting his internal battles than fighting the
Conservatives. The liability that Wilson
had was that the Trade Unions were too often his enemies. The Conservatives may have had that problem
but that was part of their attraction for many voters.

In the Labour
Party it is the convention that the Left elements of the day were of importance
and so they were, but my view is the element that is forgotten and was at the
centre of much of Labour government ought to be remembered for their damaging
effect. The Conservatives may have been
the party of Empire, but Labour's elite and intellectuals had many of The
Children of The Raj who believed in the rule of the wise elite of their time.

We were in
Scarborough in 1967 and when the Labour Party held its conference there that
year I went into some meetings. One was
a talk given by Lord Gardiner, Lord Chancellor, about the legal nature of
constitutional issues. During questions
he was asked one about the North of Ireland and inadvertently blew the gaff on
the lack of policy. The rest of the
conference I saw as people who lacked faith determined to convince the party
faithful.

This brief Pathe clip sums up the overall media attention to the bean
feast. In the broadsheets there was a
little more analysis and thought, but in general little about what we now know
to be the things that mattered. We were
all being told what and how to think and how the way on offer was the only
way. Yet across the board and especially
in the economy the changes in the world were radical and extensive.

What Wilson
failed to do was what others failed to do and that was to realise and recognise
how much the world had changed and how Britain had declined in relative status
and what the realities were. Whether
they knew this but had to lie and pretend otherwise, I am not sure. But in failing to understand they took on too
much and created an economy and polity that was never going to be the real
future.

Because in a
sense they were trying to live in a past that had gone and had never really
existed and trying to reward those of the past by taking from those who might
have provided a better future. Wilson
may have been good with the figures, the pity is he did not realise that the
figures were neither accurate nor reliable for future policy.

2 comments:

He was successful in one way - he stopped me voting Labour. I noted at the time that his "government" had made huge cuts in education and defence and remarked that as a result Brits soon be too thick to be worth defending.